Life and Death of a Strawberry
by Batty Catty Pumpkin Pie
Summary: The Kurosakis get a surprise - their first child is born five days late, a girl. A fem Ichigo's life divided into two parts: thirteen personal essays revolving around her life, and then a much more infamous account of her life after (becoming) death. IchiHitsu. Anime centric, not always manga compliant.
1. The Intensive Care Unit

Author's Note: Keep in mind, these essays are supposedly publicly available in Ichigo's world. So no ghosts will be directly referenced.

* * *

 **Part One: Life of a Strawberry**

 **The Unlucky Thirteen Essay Collection**

 **Essay One: The Intensive Care Unit**

It wasn't called hospice. It was called the intensive care unit. This was a lie. It was essentially hospice, a place for the slowly dying. Statistically, if one was looking at ten intensive care patients, maybe two would survive to leave the unit.

Until very recently in history, human death has been relatively quick. We did not have the medical advances and technology necessary to prolong life. Now we do. This does not mean that nobody dies; rather, it means that dying people die much more slowly, and thus have a much worse quality of life while they're dying.

Consider a patient of my father's: by the end of all the surgery he'd had to do to keep her alive, she had dry gangrene of the foot which would have to be amputated, a large open abdominal wound with leaking bowel contents, she could not eat, she needed a tracheotomy, her kidneys were gone, and she would have to spend the rest of her life on a dialysis machine. To top it all off? What he'd originally treated her for was not getting any better.

Was she close to death? Maybe, but with constant dressing and the help of dialysis machines, feeding tubes, and amputation, it was hard to tell. She could live for years in that horrific in-between state. That's where hospice care comes in. People who work in hospice and intensive care try to make slow death as livable as possible. They can do nothing to save their patients, but they can comfort them in their final years.

My father ran a small family clinic from the bottom and front part of our house. He was a doctor. "Ichigo," he told me once when I was in junior high, "I want you to spend six months providing hospice care for people in the intensive care unit. I want you to emotionally, spiritually, and physically counsel and care for them through dying."

My father insisted that all three of his daughters do nursing duty shifts at his hospital. I was supposed to be born a boy. I was born five days late, on July 20th, and came out a girl instead. The ultrasound had made a mistake; a fraction of limb had been mistaken for a penis in the photograph. I often wondered how my life would have been different if I had been born a boy. Would my father still have mandated shifts at the hospital clinic?

"Dad, I'm not even religious or spiritual myself," I said, bewildered and kind of angry and thirteen years old and uncomfortable with facing the dying for some very personal reasons. "I'm no good at talking about emotions. What the hell am I supposed to say?"

"You'll figure it out," he said simply.

"What about school?"

"I'll take care of the unit while you're at school. You'll take care of it before and after school. Six months, Ichigo. You can do this!" He clapped me on the shoulder and walked off to take care of a patient. "I have faith in you!"

I have often speculated since about why a father would make his preteen daughter handle people in hospice care. He was a macho "tough it out" sort of guy, but I didn't think that was it. I'd always had a strange connection with death. My mother died when I was nine. I'd faced the back end of death. Maybe my father wanted to see his growing daughter face and accept the front end. And maybe, just maybe, he wanted his growing daughter to accept that nobody could save everyone.

I was also well aware of the studies that indicated hospice care, far from hastening death, sometimes prolonged life. I might be prolonging life for some patients by caring for them and being there for them. In the state they were in, was that a good thing? That was a matter up for debate.

I sighed. "Fuck," I muttered, and put down my school book bag to go put on my white nursing uniform. I would do this every day after school, without fail, for the next six months.

* * *

The Kurosaki Clinic hospital was separated into two wings: standard care on one side of the main hallway, intensive care on the other side. Intensive care consisted of two long rows of dying people hooked up to machines in white hospital beds, separated by curtains. There were TVs on each end of the room, always turned on.

For the six months I was working in the wing, the hospice care consisted of a young mother with stage four lung cancer, a highly drugged eighty year old woman with congestive heart failure, a middle aged woman who had refused treatment with metastasized bone cancer and a fungal pneumonia that had arisen in the final stages of her illness, and an old woman with end-stage respiratory and kidney failure who had been forced into the clinic by her children even though she didn't want to die slowly like her husband had. There was only one man, and he had senile dementia and no living family.

I had my physical duties: I settled people into wheelchairs and took them walking around the block in the sun, I served them bland but safe food and helped feed them, I changed and cleaned their sheets and their bedpans. I took the best care I could for their various illnesses, from administering drugs to making sure they took their medicine. I had to take special care of the man with dementia; I was required to keep his whole life scheduled for him, remind him of things and explain things to him over and over again, reintroduce myself every time I met him, keep him from wandering off. I brought in therapy dogs once after making sure no one had any allergies, smiling sadly as I watched the delighted patients play with them and pet them.

Strangely? This was the easy part. I was better at keeping calm and nursing the dying than I thought I would be. Other parts of working hospice were much harder. The entire wing reeked of death and antiseptic, a smell entirely impossible to describe, and it was full of long rows of passive, quiet people - not only waiting to die, but wishing for it.

That was the worst part. Somehow, it would have been easier if they were hysterical and unaccepting.

The emotional and spiritual aspects of hospice were the hardest. I've always had a Resting Bitch Face, and I had to work hard not to look like I was about to punch somebody's head off. But I also had to talk to the patients, counsel them, and this was entirely uncomfortable because for as long as I was around the clinically dying, I was constantly angry and upset.

Each patient required individualized care. I had to sit with them as they worried about their families, try to talk them through periods of depression and anxiety. They asked me whether or not death would hurt. I would be woken in the middle of the night to talk them through horrific nightmares of things to come. They told me that they felt lonely, alone. They asked about their health state, and I had to answer honestly while also trying not to upset them. It was emotionally exhausting and required a level of tact I didn't always have, but I didn't feel like bitching - my discomfort was nothing compared to the pain they were going through. I tried to make them feel cared for, schedule meetings with priests of varying religions, ordered more therapy dog visits.

Mostly I felt useless. Like I could do nothing of real significance. And that frustrated me.

"What do you think happens to us after we die?" the middle aged woman who had refused treatment asked me once in my first week. The young mother looked over curiously.

I replied without thinking: "I think it depends on what kind of person you were in life. There is the Hell realm, the Ghost realm, the Rebirth realm, and the Enlightened Realm."

"Ah. You're a Buddhist," said the woman, but I could see her sagging sadly.

"Not a terribly religious one, but yes." I looked at her for a long moment. "But do you know what the great thing about Buddhism is?" I said at last. "You can always change your karma around by being a better person. No matter who you used to be, if you become a compassionate person that cares for others, you can reverse any damage you might have done to your soul. Anyone at any stage of their cyclical existence can start trying to be a better person, and their rebirths will be better and they'll work closer towards Enlightenment.

"It's not about what kind of person you were. It's about what kind of person you choose to be."

The woman stared at me. "You know a lot about death for someone who's only thirteen."

"I've had a lot of time to think about it," I admitted.

The two women smiled. Somehow, with my crippling bluntness, I seemed to have comforted and pleased them. "What is your name?" said the middle aged woman.

"Ichigo," I replied. "Kurosaki Ichigo."

"Ichigo. It means 'strawberry.' What a sweet name…" said the woman with quiet, hoarse longing.

Usually I got annoyed when people called my name cute. Not this time. I was too sad and sympathetic to be angry or cruel.

"My name also means 'one who protects'," I said smoothly instead, turning back to her IV. "That's why I'm here."

"You care a lot about death," the young mother observed, and I paused. "I can see it. You're upset when you see us, because death affects you personally. Why do you care so much about death?" she asked me.

I stepped away from the IV and said quietly: "Because even I can't save everyone."

* * *

I was there when my mother died.

She was walking me back home from karate class. I was nine years old. We were holding hands, me in my rain jacket, her with her umbrella. It was pouring rain, a summer thunderstorm, and it had been raining for days.

Suddenly, a truck zoomed past us on the road, splashing me with water. I was closest.

"Oh, what a mean truck!" my mother said softly, leaning down to wipe my face with her handkerchief decorated with floral perfume. "Here, we'll switch sides. I'll walk by the road."

"No, Mommy. I'll walk closest, because I want to protect you," I said earnestly. Ever since learning my name was a guardian's, I had entertained fantastical daydreams of protecting everybody I loved: my friends, my Dad, my Mom, and my little sisters. It was why I had entered karate class.

"Well, I feel much safer now, don't I?" she said, a smile in her voice. "But until you can beat Tatsuki in a karate match, I think I'll be the protector."

My mother was always the protector, the nurturer. She filled her children's world with love, and laughed at my father's jokes and goofy antics, covering his world in light. I think she wanted our first memories to be happy ones, and tried hard to make that happen. When I grew up, I wanted to be just like her - a great protector.

I shouted now into the muffled cloth.

"What is it? I can't hear you!" she said with singsong humor, and removed the handkerchief from my face.

"I said I'll beat her someday!" I shouted indignantly. Tatsuki was the only other girl in my karate class, but don't take that as a sign of her weakness - she was the most vicious of any of us. She beat me in every spar, and at the end of every spar I cried, a humiliating tendency.

"That's the kind of spirit I like to hear!" said Mom cheerfully, still amused, and she stood closer to the road, switching the umbrella to her other hand and taking my hand in hers. "Now. Time for home. Tonight I think I'll make -" Mom was part nurse for Dad, part homemaker. We'd begun walking again.

But I don't remember anything else, because all of a sudden I looked across the street full of zooming cars and I saw something. The river across the street was swelling, flooding, with rain, and a girl was standing on the edge of the flood, as if she was about to dive into it, as if she was waiting for the rain to swallow her. She was pale with short black hair and silvery eyes.

Remember, I had a hero complex. I wanted to save her. I've had a complicated relationship towards the idea of being a hero ever since.

I snatched my hand out of my Mom's grasp and darted toward the girl across the street full of cars, ready to pull her back. "Ichigo, no!" I heard my Mom shout, and I heard her footsteps running after me. I'd reached the edge of the riverbank unscathed. There was a screech of wheels, something hit me from behind, and I blacked out.

When I woke up, the girl had gone. Nobody else had seen her.

* * *

I squirmed, coming to, underneath a heavy weight. I was soaked with something warm, and my face was in the wet, sticky mud. With effort, I turned around to see what was on top of me.

I saw my mother's dead face.

To describe what that moment felt like is impossible. So I'll just describe her face. She was smiling. Her eyes were glassy and blank. Her face was a cold whitish blue. Her brown curls were messy around her. The warm something was her blood. She was bleeding all over the riverbank.

I screamed.

I screamed and screamed and I kept screaming, as I dug for purchase and my nails dug into her skin, as I dragged myself out from under her, covered in mud and blood.

"Oh my God!" passing drivers who had stopped were gasping. "Her daughter is still alive!"

I was covered in mud and blood. I clutched myself and screamed.

* * *

For days afterward, every afternoon, I went to that riverbank. I paced, sat down, then paced some more. I pretended to my Dad that I was going to school, but I wasn't.

I don't know what I was waiting for. Eventually I just stopped going.

I think I was different, after that. Not as idealistic. I stopped pretending I was some kind of hero. Weirdly? I also started beating Tatsuki in karate matches. I stopped crying. It was as if, after all that hysterical screaming, the tears were just… gone.

The following months were strange. I'd be going along just fine, and then some weird thing would remind me of her. Once I was out shopping and I caught a whiff of the perfume she used to wear. And I completely lost my shit. I ended up sprinting out of the shop and across the parking lot, but it was as if my knees weren't working properly. I barely made it a block before collapsing against a pole, shaking. Not even crying, just… shaking. Gasping for air, like I was having a panic attack. I didn't feel like crying. Actually, I felt a little like I wanted to throw up.

I was angry for days afterward. I would go to gym and viciously punch and kick a punching bag until I was too tired to feel the choking fury anymore.

Moments like that happened a lot.

Stranger still were the days when nothing really seemed to have a point, when I just lay in bed all day and couldn't find the will to do anything. My thoughts raced. You have to understand… our family was a solar system. And Mom was the sun. Everyone, Dad, Karin, Yuzu, me, we all revolved around our mother. She was the one I had most wanted to protect. And she was the one I had failed. I had taken her from them.

Every time I saw Karin refuse to cry, every time I saw Yuzu actually cry, every time I saw my father looking much more tired than usual… it reminded me of that. Those were usually the days when I couldn't get out of bed. Then I'd feel even more useless. Or if a nightmare of her death would come? Maybe I wouldn't get out of bed for days.

It was my fault, you see. If I hadn't run across the road, my mother never would have been hit. And I may not have been a hero, but I knew that if I ever saw someone I loved die again, I would really lose my shit. Completely. For mostly selfish reasons, I swore that would never happen.

No one yelled at me. That was the hardest part. Nobody was angry with me. It would have been easier, I think, if someone had yelled at me. My father, one of my sisters, anyone. If _someone_ had been angry with me. But no one was. Not openly, anyway.

I remember in middle school, I was at this school play, and they started talking about grief and loss, death and depression. All the blood drained from my face as the words echoed through my brain, and I started trembling. _Guilt. Anger. Loss of energy. Loss of life force. Suicidal thoughts._

I barely made it halfway through the play before sprinting out of the theater. This is my great secret: In the end, I'm always a coward.

* * *

I lost my first hospice care patient two months in.

It was the old man, the one with senile dementia. When I came in to check on him, brushing back the curtain and announcing myself in a sing-song voice - I knew immediately he was dead.

I rushed forward, checking his pulse, frantically calling his name. There was no response.

My father found me crying half an hour later out in front of the intensive care unit. He sighed and sat down beside me.

"Someone died, didn't they?"

Unable to choke anything out, I nodded.

"It happens, Ichigo," he said simply. "People die. There was nothing you could have done, and at some point you're going to have to accept that."

I knew we weren't just talking about hospice care anymore.

"He had a brother who brought him in here," I choked out, furious but sobbing nonetheless. I still got teary when I was angry, and it was still a humiliating tendency. My hand was bunched running through my hair. "What the hell am I supposed to say to _him_?"

"Tell him the truth," said my father. "His brother was sick. Now he's dead. It's the same thing with your mother. She made the choice to cross the road. A car hit her, and now she's dead."

I looked up at him through my crying.

Suddenly, a little old lady wheeled herself out into the hallway in a wheelchair. I paused in surprise. It was the lady I'd always thought was so drugged-up.

"I want to talk to her." She pointed my father mercilessly down the hall. "You go somewhere else."

My father shrugged, smiling cheerfully enough. He nodded and left.

"He died and _you're_ crying?" the little old lady snapped.

"You can talk," I said in surprise.

"Of course I can talk!" she shouted, and I jumped a little bit. "I just didn't want to!

"Look," she said flatly. "You make everyone in that room happy. You even made that old man happy."

"But… he didn't even know me," I said, confused. "I had to reintroduce myself to him _every_ time I walked in there."

"Maybe he didn't remember you consciously. But every time he saw you, his whole being brightened. It's not his fault if you were too stupid to notice." She glared at me. "You made him happy. Sometimes, that has to be enough."

And she wheeled herself back into the intensive care unit.

The funny part? She had heart surgery a month later. She was the only patient I knew who made it back out of the intensive care unit.

I cared for the rest of them as they died, one by one. Died just like my mother had.

 _Tell the truth. Something happened, and now they're dead. You made them happy. Sometimes, that has to be enough._

 _People die. There was nothing you could have done, and at some point you're going to have to accept that._

The trick, I suppose I have learned, is to know when you can do something and when you can't. When making them happy is enough, and when it isn't.

I recommended that old lady to heart surgery. It's why she survived.


	2. It Started With Mix Tapes

Author's Note: Fun fact. Whenever I picture fem Ichigo, I always picture Jessica Chastain, with long, loose, wild, wavy reddish-orange hair. Unfortunately, Jessica Chastain is not Japanese. Anyone got any Japanese actress, musician, or model recommendations that fit the picture?

* * *

 **Essay Two: It Started With Mix Tapes**

I had a friend in junior high who got me into music. His name was Chad - or, well, it was Yasutora Sado, but I called him Chad and it stuck. He was a big half-Mexican guy with a tattoo who played in a band, and we'd become friends after getting into some pretty nasty fights together - me because of my bizarre orange hair color, him because Chad's always had a problem with staying out of fights where other people are getting hurt. He's a good guy, not what you'd think, usually gentle, quiet, and kind with a love for animals.

But he's the one who got me into the punk scene.

Maybe it was just because the first time he'd met me, I'd beaten the shit out of several people, I was bleeding from the lip, and I was grinning with bizarrely colored hair. Maybe it was my cheerful, fuck-you demeanor. But Chad was an old-fashioned guy, so he handed me a portable tape player and a bunch of old fashioned mix tapes one day at school. "Here," he said simply, "you need to listen to this."

And so was I introduced to punk. And it was beautiful.

The music was really what got me first. I had an instinctive love for the sound, from punk rock to pop punk, electropunk, and gothic punk. Punk was all about making a lot of noise and individualism and fucking over the establishment, and those were three things I was really into, so punk and I were a perfect fit. I loved satire and the idea of tearing down the sacred. Punk and I were meant to be.

What I really loved most about punk, though, was that - unlike in a lot of other types of hard rock music - punk liberally included women. I think that might have been one of the only reasons why I got as into it as I did.

Immediately I went out and bought about ten thousand albums of music, slowly progressing to the level where I basically had headphones in all the time. I didn't believe in doing oldfashioned things for the sake of sentimentality, so I just used plain ol' mp3. I bought hundreds of black and red punk rock posters. Eventually I saved up enough money to buy myself an electric guitar. Chad played bass guitar in his band, and he taught me enough that I could start to go off on my own. Sometimes we played together, or wrote songs together, and that was a nice feeling.

I started joining him and his band at gigs, which basically consisted of shitty bars and tiny, sketchy clubs full of some really freaky people. I had fun, grinning and heckling the band from offstage, laughing off the weirdos who tried to approach me. One thing about punk guys? Most of them are actually super gentlemanly. If someone was bothering me, some big guy in a studded leather jacket would get all up in the asshole's face and the asshole would back down.

I would join Chad and his friend for drinks and smokes afterward, playing one of the guys, and I became a social drinker - not a really intense one, but I'd clutch a drink or two throughout the night - and a smoker. I found I was good at taking shots - tequila, vodka, that kind of thing. Not enough to get totally wasted, but enough to get buzzed. I would throw down the shot glass and grin at the guy I'd beaten.

"You have a strong constitution," Chad would tell me after crazy nights out, impressed. (He was of course always there to make sure I never got hurt. Chad was naturally ever protective.) But it wasn't really that. I just never let myself be pressured past my comfort point. If someone didn't like that, they could fuck right off.

I tried to hide my smoking from my Dad. He tolerated me coming home after having some drinks, and he was actually pretty easygoing about me leaving a pre-prepared dinner for everyone in the fridge and being out somewhere mysterious for the night, but as he was a doctor I didn't think he'd be too impressed by smoking. I wasn't a chain smoker or anything. I didn't have an addictive personality. I had maybe one or two every couple of days. But somehow I got the suspicious feeling that was kind of insignificant to a parent.

I only smoked when I was away from the house. If I really wanted a cigarette while at home, I'd make the excuse that I was going down to the local corner store to get a bottle of juice or lemonade. Breath mints and gum became my best friends. Just in case, I started building up arguments in my head, all of them going something along the lines of, "You used to smoke. Including as a med student and a younger doctor."

Sometimes I got a sneaking feeling he kind of knew but was only going to yell at me if I was too obvious about it. He'd give me amused sideways smiles when I made the corner store excuse. My Dad's always been weird like that. He puts on a good show of being stern and unbending, but deep down underneath he lets his stupid kids be stupid kids.

So it was almost a game we played. I'd hear him walking near me unexpectedly, and I'd hiss, "Shit!" and quickly stomp out my cigarette. Then he'd come around the corner and I'd laugh nervously. "Hi…"

He never said anything, but I suspected I was obvious.

At last, though, one of Chad's older bandmate's girlfriends insisted that I had to walk the walk if I was going to talk the talk. "You can't keep coming in here in sweaters, tights, and pencil skirts," she mandated. "It's embarrassing."

Secretly I'd been embarrassed too. Nobody else dressed like I did. I'd just been afraid of saying anything. I'd actually been interested in looking into the whole punk fashion scene for a while.

So I lifted my chin defiantly. "Well then are you going to help me?" I said sarcastically. "Please instruct me as to where you would like most to go."

There were some loud, "Ooohs" and the older girl grinned. "Now we're talking," she said. Once you get them going? In a teasing way, punk people can actually be super friendly.

She took me out shopping that weekend. "I'll warn you," I said. "I like slim fit clothes and I'm tall, skinny, gawky, and awkward. And I'm not dyeing my hair. The orange hair's staying."

"Why?" she said in surprise.

I grinned. "Because it's my natural color and everyone fucking hates it."

I ended up going between classy and edgy. I wore lots of plaid prints, alongside leather sleeved jackets, blouses, high rise mini skirts, tights, and booties (if I wanted to look fabulous) or Doc Martens (if I wanted to be able to run away from pretty much anything). The use of black was liberal, of course. Also I had an irrational love for messy plaid.

I had a tailored black belted coat that I really liked, too. Tights, booties, and that long, thigh-length jacket were _tres magnifique,_ very glamorous. My militaristic army green tailored coat with gold buttons covered in sarcastic and political pins was a close second for favorite jackets, though.

A cool look for summer was see-through plastic-frame white sunglasses with purple tint, a black tailored blazer, a cropped black lace blouse, and purple skinny jeans. Preferably paired with a shoulder bag for shopping. Another good summer outfit with a shoulder bag was black leather jacket, black top, cuffed black leather shorts, and chunky ankle-length boots, preferably with dark hose.

My absolute favorite pair of shoes look was a pair of thigh-high matte black leather gaiters paired with chunky pointed-toe block-heeled boots, complete with silver chains.

My most embarrassing but beloved piece of clothing was a shiny silvery blazer. My defense was that it looked oddly good with my hair color. My favorite hat was a black driver's cap, which deliciously went with all my most boyish clothes and especially well with plaid or a jacket tied around the waist. I did have a short dark semi-sheer dress and a long silvery maxi dress, but absolutely no place to wear either of them. Sometimes I wore them to parties just as an excuse to wear them - double fun, I could out glamor everybody else in the room.

Next came the makeup and hair. The orange color stayed, as did the long length. Usually I did one of two things with my hair, at first with help from my friend's girlfriend. I either swept that long, wavy mess off to one side of my head, exposing the entire other side of my head using a comb, as if that side had been buzzed. If I wanted my hair up, I wore a messy bouffant bun right on top of my head, with long pieces of hair framing either side of my face.

I stocked up well on makeup. I chose liquid eyeliner to go for a bolder look, and subtle lip gloss so that the eyes popped. I typically dotted little teal and purple stars around the lower parts of my eyes, my love for astronomy coming out.

I also got tattoos - not for the fun of it. I wanted to make sure they meant something. My most intricate tattoo also meant the most to me. My late mother's name, Masaki, meant "tree." So I got a lower back tattoo of a detailed tree in memory of my mother. The trunk went up my spine, the place that held my lifeline, and the name "Masaki" was engraved up and down the trunk. A chunky, block-letter, shaded one and a five was displayed on either side of the tree, a play on my name: "Ichi" meant one and "Go" meant five.

There were the two of us, together forever, tattooed onto my back.

I also tattooed the names of all four of my family members in tiny letters on my wrists. They were right above and below the vital veins for life, a reminder to think of my family and never to harm myself, and they were just beside the hands I used to fight with. "Isshin" and "Masaki" - my mother and father - were on top of my wrists, an easily visible reminder, while my little sisters "Karin" and "Yuzu" were at the bottom, the biggest no no when it came to self harm.

Dad made lots of jokes about teenage rebellion, but yet again he let me do what I wanted with my life. Karin thought the tattoos were "cool," while Yuzu was impressed romantically by how "edgy" I had apparently become.

I didn't know if I really thought of it that way, but people at school seemed to. I got two reactions to my punk look: on the one hand were people who seemed admiring of how "confident and individual" I was, and on the other hand there were the teachers who made assumptions about me based on my appearance - in spite of the fact that I got good grades and always turned in my work on time, in spite of the fact that I never skipped school. They looked at my appearance and my performance in the school karate and kendo clubs, and they made assumptions.

That I was a rebel, gangster, Yankee - that kind of thing. Sometimes other students thought that, too. I guess I should add a third group - the people I intimidated with my appearance, reputation, and Angry Resting Bitch Face. It was sort of absurd, having tenderly cared for dying people in hospice for my father's hospital, then turning around and being called some kind of horrible gangster.

In reality, I was just participating in something I loved. It was the same with fighting as it was with punk. Fighters and punk rockers became my people as I got older. And there was so much more to me than that. I did drink carefully. I did only smoke occasionally. I never had casual sex. I never picked stupid fights - though I wasn't afraid of getting into one. There's nothing wrong with getting drunk, or having casual sex, or smoking a lot, or picking stupid fights - I'm not here to judge anybody's lifestyle choices. I'm just saying, that's what people would have expected of me, and I didn't do any of it.

I loved literature, poetry, and other kinds of writing. I had hundreds of big dog-eared old books, and often read quietly at a cafe in public over a cup of coffee, earmarking the pages and scribbling in the margins. I adored the classics, and for reasons that had nothing to do with angst and everything to do with my mother's death and my time working hospice, I was fascinated by themes of death and grief and by trauma literature. I had ink stains on my fingers from my writing, from my constant editing and re-editing and doodling in old pages of notebook paper. And did I write angsty poetry? No, not really. Most of my poetry was from a character's perspective, telling a fictional story, exploring social issues I saw in the world around me.

I attended school theater and arts performances in a defiant attempt to up their numbers. My social media was mostly art related and was darkly, quietly poetic, full of quotes and strange, dark, peculiar art pieces. I loved manga, videogames, horror, sci fi, and crime drama. I was a computer nerd who loved tea, wanted to travel, carried around a bottle of hot sauce, and ate weird food. I was a mother figure in my family. I was a best girl friend, I was one of the guys.

There was so much more to me than being punk or being a fighter, but that was all people saw.

Stereotypes can be good. I'm not saying they're always horrible. Human beings group each other together for a reason, so that like minded people can find each other and to make sense of the world. Stereotypes can comfort.

But that's also the nasty flip side: Stereotypes can comfort. That also means they can confine. They can relax other viewers and affirm their ideas about the world, suffocating the stereotyped person into a tiny box with no room for individualism.

* * *

Author's Note: Just to head off any comments... first, Chad has a Western style tattoo. I guess you could make the argument that he's half Mexican, but he was a child when he left Mexico and I doubt he got the tattoo as a child.

Second, Isshin used to smoke, and he did from a young age. Several young characters in Japanese anime do smoke, and it seems quite common. It's almost required in some business settings according to my research.

Third, and most importantly, underage drinking is statistically more common in Japan than it is in the United States, and is significantly easier to do. All you have to do is Google search "underage drinking in Japan" to come across these findings. If you want canon proof, Karin and Yuzu have alcohol as kids during a festival at one point in the series.


	3. Sirens and Sophistication

**Essay Three: Sirens and Sophistication**

They say you have to grow up in a city to be a big-city person. I grew up in Karakura, a prefecture of Tokyo.

I am a true big-city person. I love encountering weird people in the street - I've even had conversations with some of them, or offered money to others. I'm used to the smog and the air pollution, to having to drive for at least an hour to find a good spot for stargazing with some hot cocoa or a beautiful sunset. I even adore rush hour, the crammed trains for the smart and the long trail of lights carrying car traffic for the stupid.

(I'm not one of the stupid. I'll probably never own a car. I can walk home and get the same distance faster than some of my friends who drive.)

Mostly, I love the vast mixture of places one finds in a big city. A sketchy little adult book shop can be set right next to a vast, gleaming theater. You never know what you're going to find in a city. The possibilities are endless, and everything seems within walking distance, even the things that would seem really far away in a small town.

Everything's so interconnected.

And the cultural possibilities are endless. In a big city, every movie ever invented is playing somewhere, there are countless cultural festivals and festivities, endless schools, and the variety of cuisine is positively delectable.

You also get to explore. You never run out of neat places to go. And where are all the jobs? In the big city.

Yeah, it can get lonely. All those gleaming lights. Being one number amongst millions of people. But if you find your niches, your little groups of friends - if you consume the right art, and realize that everyone else is just as lonely as you are - I find the loneliness goes away. It's the perfect antidote, right? How else do you stop feeling lonely besides realizing in the most important ways that you're never really alone?

The pros outweigh the cons for me. I would rather have bold, interesting, dangerous experiences alone - even amidst the sometimes unfriendly - than I would have safe, ordinary experiences in the midst of comfort. It's just all about what you love most, and I love Tokyo. I love this big, crazy, wonderful city. Walking it, exploring it with other people or just by myself, finding new people and nooks and crannies.

I am a city girl. It's more expensive, and there's far more gleaming metal with neon and far less nature, but in the end I'm always a city girl.

The crime can get bad, so you have to make sure to carry mace and take care of yourself, you know? But I can take care of myself, so I'm fine. And everything is a lot more crowded, but sometimes it can be kind of fun, getting lost amid a wash of noise, a sea of people. Being anonymous, having an endless variety of possibilities. Downtown Saturday nights are especially fun. Disappearing into the crowds and the lights, laughing with friends and a drink in hand, there's nothing like it.

I think of the big city as bringing the two S's: sirens and sophistication. The ambulances are loud and constant, but the possibilities are endless. I love the boldness of big cities.

And most of all, I love Tokyo. First, when you think of the mess of a big city… it's not what you're thinking of. It's quirky, it has character, but it's not littered or graffiti filled. Most of the buildings carry a curious box shape I've been told is not found in many other parts of the world. People may not be as friendly as in a small town, but they're all still fairly polite.

Shops have everything - and I really do mean everything. Some bright colorful plastic toy could be set next to a rap dreadlocks wig which could be set next to a packaged snack which could be set next to a condom. Don't laugh. I saw it once.

It's a pedestrian city. The crosswalks literally make up at least half of the total place. And they're all nice and clean and clearly labeled, perfect for walking on, sometimes complete with crossing-guards in heavier-populated places.

There are the quirks, too. Some highlights:

Themed restaurants and cat cafes are common in Tokyo. I'll go into this more in a future essay, but I work in one (I was recommended to it by a punk friend) and it's not a great one but let me tell you - it is an experience. Pick a theme and Tokyo has it, from Super Mario Bros to vampires and ninjas. There's a restaurant based around pretty much every theme you could think of. Cat cafes, by contrast, are cafes where people bring their cats and you're allowed to pet them.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the Harajuku fashion district. You will not see outfits like it anywhere else on earth. Its fashion is definitely very Japanese avant garde. Is that a good thing? Not always. But it is a sight to behold and I love visiting sometimes just to gawk and take pictures - which lots of people do. Sometimes I kind of think that's what it's there for.

In the Shinjuku district is Piss Alley. Piss Alley is a tiny narrow alleyway full of restaurants that sell folkloric medicinal remedy food. You can find everything here from from frog sashimi to pig testicles, from still-beating frog's heart to grilled salamander. Take someone with you who speaks the language, because you definitely don't want to just point at the menu here. You truly don't know what you're going to get.

Love Hotels are plentiful in Tokyo. They're basically Japanese kink rooms. In Japan, we believe that romance and sex are private, but in private they should be allowed to be as totally weird as they want. It sort of goes along with the concept of _miai,_ or matchmaker marriages - the matchmaker pairs two people together, they see if they like each other, and if not they go their separate ways. Tradition is important, but so is what the person in the relationship wants.

Love Hotels are built essentially around this theme. Got a fetish for traditional Japanese surroundings? There's a room for that. Classroom fetish? There's a room for that. Dungeon fetish? Don't laugh - there's a room for that. You pay and get your room key from a little slotted door, so no one ever sees you, and then you're free to head upstairs and get your kink on.

The vending machines also bear mentioning. I've seen vending machines that carry umbrellas, necessities like eggs and fruit, condoms, and surgical masks. I've heard of one that sells puppies. I've seen one that sells socks made of sushi - which makes sense, because after all, sushi is super squishy and comfortable. I saw another one that sold jars of grilled flying fish floating in algae - to flavor udon with, duh.

I'm laughing as I write this. Keeping a straight face is hard.

And finally, we come to the pachinko parlors, a cross between arcades and slot machines. They always bear worth looking into, unless you have a gaming addiction or gambling habit I guess.

So that's Tokyo itself. What's in Karakura…?

Honestly, not as much. My Dad tried to find a safe, mild, and tame section of town to raise his three daughters in. This actually has its advantages. I can take a breather in my home base, then venture out using the metro system - usually calm though crammed, and always on time - and explore the more dangerous and venturesome parts of the city.

I guess the part of me that most loves Tokyo is the part of me that loves being independent. I cook and clean for my family. I take over the house completely when my father is gone for conferences. And honestly, I don't mind being alone.

It's kind of a nice idea, finding my own little city apartment, whether in Tokyo or somewhere else, finding my way around a brand new city and discovering neat little hole in the wall places…


	4. Robot Mania

**Essay Four: Robot Mania**

I started working for Robot Mania in my final year of junior high.

I mentioned that I'd been looking for some extra spending cash, and a punk friend recommended it to me. "There's a robot themed cat cafe two districts away that's looking for a new waitress."

I wrinkled my nose, amused. "You mean, one of those hokey I'd have to dress up and be a character kinds of places?"

"Well ex _cuse_ me Miss I Want Money But I'm Above A Job," she said sarcastically over the drinks we were having.

"Good point," I admitted, and I decided to go out for the job.

I printed and filled out my application online, knowing nothing about the place, but I was called in for an interview. I ended up approaching a crummy little building painted over with shiny silver to imitate a metallic box. The sign above the door announced: Robot Mania! Only the T had gone out, so it looked like Robo Mania.

I walked in, and the whole place smelled of cat piss. Cats wound between people's feet, and customers would pet them on the way by. The inside was as shiny metallic as the outside, and all the waiters and waitresses were dressed up like robots who had to sing and dance before they took orders or delivered the food. And the food didn't even, like, look appetizing.

I sighed. _Beggars can't be choosers,_ I thought, because I'd had zero luck finding a job otherwise, and I approached the hostess.

"Hi!" she grinned, making a jerky, robotic movement. "Welcome to -"

"I'm here for the job," I said flatly.

Her smile fell so fast it was like she'd never been smiling at all. "Oh thank God," she said. "My cheekbones were getting tired. Okay, the manager's office is in the back. This way."

I followed the robot girl into a back office. She knocked, and I entered. It was a cramped little space carrying a paper filled desk and a balding middle aged man with a bulbous nose.

"You're the applicant?" he said, raising his eyebrows. "Kurosaki Ichigo, was it?"

"Yes, sir," I said, a little nervous, and I sat down in front of him, the door swinging shut behind us.

"Let's get to it, then," he sighed, not incredibly enthused. And we began the interview. It started like many a job interview had, and I tried to answer the questions as best I could. At the end, he sighed, "Okay. You've got the job."

"What? Just like that?" I said, surprised.

"You've got the whole alternative look," he said, bored. I did? "We're looking for that. And your application and interview check out fine. The job is yours."

I stood, my whole being expanding, beaming into his glaring, deadpan face. "Thank you, sir, I will not let you down!"

Oh how naive I was.

First, I had to enter and put on my uniform through a back door. Second, I had to act like a robot, even around my coworkers, every second of my working day. I had to do the whole humiliating bit: the song and dance when I delivered food, everything. Customers had to be completely immersed in the experience the entire time they were at Robot Mania.

This in addition to getting used to being a waitress in and of itself, juggling plates and demands and trying to remember orders, standing on my feet for several hours a day.

Then there were the trials and travails that came with a cat cafe. I was the new girl, so every time a customer's cat shat or peed on the floor, guess who got to clean it up? Yeah, look at me in my new job. So glamorous.

I learned a lot about cats at Robot Mania, too. They can go from completely adorable to mean, clawing little shits so fast it's a little insane. They also stare at you as they're peeing on the floor, as if daring you to punish them. And you can't get angry at their owners, who are customers, and mostly just coo over their stupid cats.

Cats are tiny, furry assholes. I'm completely convinced they're secretly taking over the world. One of these days I'm going to have to go to jail for committing cat homicide in my workplace. They're going to start peeing and stare at me challengingly one day, and I'm just going to run over and strangle them.

And it will be horrible. But worth it.

Then there were the plays we as "robots" put on every afternoon. We had to put on musicals, plays, and robot wars where inevitably I always had to pretend to choke and fall over dying from a fake stab wound. We had "employee meetings" where we had to practice acting out the plays and sketches.

And there were the guys who liked the cutesy girl robot outfits a little too much. Once a guy with an obvious boner in a three piece suit made a grab for my thigh. I had learned to deal with this by now and snatched at his hand, nearly crushing it with sheer force.

The best part? I was still in character. The jerky movement was perfect. I had become a better actress.

I beamed and tilted my head like a robot, my eyes blank. "The minute you touch me, I go into my homicide sequence!" I said brightly. "Isn't that fun?"

The sweating, nervous man looked to the manager who was walking around inspecting the place. "She's threatening me!"

"She's being in character," said my manager, wryly amused, and he kept walking. He actually wasn't a bad boss - he was just tired and deadpan and never seemed to give a shit about anything. That could have explained the state of the restaurant.

It was about as I'd expected. The place always smelled like cat piss and the food was shit. Inevitably, this would always be taken out on the waitresses, the only ones who couldn't do anything about these problems. A customer would storm up to me and be like, "The place stinks and I didn't even get the right order! What kind of restaurant is this?"

And I was not allowed to say: "It's a shitty, robot themed cat cafe, you dumb bitch, and I can't control what people do with their fucking cats or how your food comes out." Even when I really, _really_ wanted to.

Instead, I would say, "I apologize, I'll go talk to the chef and have them remake your order, and we'll give the place a wash-down…" I must have said this about ten times a day. It never seemed to make anything better.

Meanwhile, I would be despairing with the chefs in the kitchen behind the scenes. "I got another complaint from a customer about their meal! Can't you cook it a _little_ less thorough?" I'd wail.

The chef would throw down his towel, indignant. "What? I put all that time into the food and they don't even like it?!"

I suspected this was bullshit, that he didn't actually put any time into the food at all. I asked the manager if I could make the food myself, because I was sure I'd do a much better job, but he said he wasn't hiring me as a chef because I hadn't gone to culinary school. He called me "an arrogant, jumped up little shit," for good measure.

So in the end, I went to Robot Mania three times a week after school, working karate and kendo club meetings around my new job, I did the hokey, beaming act complete with singing and dancing, practiced for and performed in the dumb robot war plays, juggled people's plates and demands, tried to remember their orders and check up on them regularly. I even entered through the back door to get in uniform and kept in character through every single shift, just as I was supposed to.

And you know what I got in the end? A paycheck, lots of cat claw marks and cat bowel movements to clean up, and a bunch of people yelling at me every day over shit I couldn't actually control.

Everyone has at least one shitty, soul crushing job in their life. From middle school through into high school, that was mine.

I guess I learned a lot from it. We can learn a lot from shitty jobs. We learn how to deal with bullshit well, what we don't want in a workplace. We learn that no paying job is entirely beneath us. Most of all, we learn to be responsible for our own choices.

"You decided to work there," my Dad would remind me, amused, every time I started complaining about Robot Mania. "You can quit and take extra shifts at the clinic instead any time you want to."

But I wanted a job where I was independent, not relying on my father for money. It was why I put up with Robot Mania.

Some weird skills I learned from my time in a themed cat cafe? I learned how to pick up a clawing cat without getting scratched, and how to get pee stains out of a rug or wall. And I learned how to sing, dance, and be a good actress. I even learned how to keep a better hold on my temper, becoming a little less angry and a little more deadpan in the face of utter insanity and idiocy.

I was like a weathered soldier. I was used to insanity and idiocy.

So hey, new life skills. Who'd have thought?


End file.
